I am thinking of re-posting just the rule without the essay as its own article. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
The rule I have put forth here is another rule that I used a lot back in the early nineties. As I mentioned in the text, the inspiration came from a rule found in Avalon Hill's "Firepower". In that game a more realistic approach to defeating armor is taken than the ablative method in BattleTech. In real armor typically a round either does penetrate the armor of a vehicle or it does not. Unless a second incoming shot hits exactly the same spot as the previous hit the armor is every bit as effective for the second hit as the first, so, weapons in Firepower have a penetration rating and a blast rating but no "damage" per se. Once the weapon is deemed to have penetrated there 1d10 is rolled against the blast rating for the weapon for every item on a list of internal equipment in the tank/apc hit. This formed the basis for the rule proposed.
This rule has been extensively play-tested, indeed I think I have used it more often than the standard critical hit tables. It really does resolve a lot faster and there are no "re rolls" for empty spots or spots with FF or ES boxes. The d20 method listed is the one where the number of critical hits most closely resembles the canonical table.
In practice the folks I played with tended to prefer using d10's with the same hit numbers as listed on the table here. This meant that if an AC-20 penetrates the armor of a section there is a 50% chance for each item in that section that it will be destroyed. This is devastating to the target and really excuses the otherwise piss poor performance of autocannon in BattleTech. Even if the mass of additional heat sinks is accommodated for, medium lasers are quite superior to AC/20's.
Feel free to add to or edit this article, even substantially. I encourage the addition of variations to the rule. Clarification of the writing or of the rule itself is also welcome. If the editing goes too far astray I will re-edit it to reflect both points of view as alternates. Also, if anyone DOES try these rules out I would be interested in hearing how it went. While I have used them a lot they have not been tried by people who did not know me, ie, they had to figure it out on their own. -- LRichardson 23:55, 14 May 2011 (UTC)